Still recovering from the knee injury she suffered at the end of Radiant, Xhea has spent the last couple of months cooped up in Edren, frustrating those around her — especially Shai — with her lack of motivation in doing what she needs to do to heal. When a terrified senseless ghost appears to her with a vague warning, presaging an attack on Edren’s underground defences, Xhea finally gets some of her spark back, only to be snatched away by one of the other earthbound skyscrapers to play a role in a scheme that might change the face of the entire city. The nature of the attack severs her bond with Shai, leaving the bereft ghost convinced that her companion is dead, and without any way to communicate with the people of Edren who are all she has left… and Xhea isn’t the only thing Edren stands to lose.

I love these books. They are so tightly written, well-paced, and beautifully characterised. Defiant manages to take a plot that I usually dislike — that of characters being separated because one of them lacks information the reader is aware of, and of taking most of the book to catch up to what we already know — and makes me really appreciate its implementation. Xhea and Shai’s bond is undoubtedly the best thing about the trilogy, so it’s inevitable that it causes a little slump when they’re apart for so much of the novel, but the closeness of that bond is also why separating them for a bit works to its advantage: They genuinely grow in a way that makes the separation feel uncontrived and the coming back together earned.

Shai is, I think, the more dependent of the two and so being in a situation where she has to stand on her own and help those with whom she’s unable to communicate fosters a lot of growth, and also cements that she loves Xhea for Xhea and not just because Xhea was her avenue to freedom.

Xhea gets some much-needed answers both about the nature of her powers (though there’s still a lot left for the third book) and her family history, and it’s also quite good to see her placed in a moral conundrum without Shai to serve as her moral compass. The exploration of her power and the morality of some of its uses is excellent; the family history is, I think, the one thing I would call out as a weak aspect of the book. I simply don’t buy that they would have been unable to find her if they had put genuine effort into trying, considering that they were aware of her power and would’ve been able to track her down with the same ease as her clients (which, as we saw at the beginning of Radiant, was hardly difficult). We seem to be expected to believe that this was the case though, considering the earnestness of her interactions with her surviving relative and that Xhea does very little emotional wrestling with it before moving on. It doesn’t ring quite true for someone with such an intense abandonment complex and the whole issue feels a bit swept under the carpet, but it serves to tie up the loose thread acceptably enough.

Defiant does for the earthbound skyscrapers what Radiant did for the Towers, bringing alive their culture and rivalries without excessive exposition, and does an impressive job of walking the fine balance of introducing a lot more secondary characters to care about — or feel sorry for — without detracting from the focus on Xhea and Shai. I feel like in this respect it was a little more nuanced than Radiant, where it was largely Xhea and Shai against the world and their opponents weren’t worthy of much sympathy; here the bad guys, insofar as there are any, are more pathetic than consciously cruel even though what they are doing is genuinely horrifying if you think about it deeply. Ieren is just a tool, despite what he can do, but he shines a light on the fact that Xhea is more than just her power, she’s defined by what she chooses to do with it.

Middle entries in trilogies often struggle, the infamous sophomore slump, but this is just such a smooth and powerful transitional book that I remain sincerely impressed that this is Karina Sumner-Smith’s first trilogy, and Defiant only her second novel overall. An epic third book awaits.